#Shirtstorm

Plenty of people talk about how GamerGate is about preserving “Journalistic Ethics,” but what does that really mean?

To answer that, I’d like to discuss a story that’s a little more mainstream than gaming: the Rosetta mission. For those of you who haven’t been following it in the news, Rosetta was a recent European mission to land a scientific probe on a comet. In a week where a top news story was Kim Kardashian’s butt, this should have been something to celebrate.

Instead, much of the major coverage of the Rosetta mission focused on Matt Taylor, the Rosetta mission’s project scientist. Or rather, it focused on his shirt. You see, during a televised press conference after the successful landing, Matt Taylor made the unfortunate choice of wearing a shirt depicting several cartoon women provocatively dressed in leather outfits.

Many online reporters jumped at the opportunity to attack Taylor for his choice of clothing. They claimed that it created a casually sexist environment that is “driving women away from science.” These articles spawned a twitter outrage against Taylor that was so severe it eventually led him to return to television, this time with tears in his eyes, to apologize for the outfit he chose to wear that day.

I hope I don’t have to explain to you how this is a messed up situation. I hope I don’t have to explain that ignoring someone’s major contributions to science because of the clothes they choose to wear is disgusting. I hope I don’t have to explain to you that “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing” (see: The Verge) is a headline that we should all be disgusted to learn actually exists.

Call this whatever you want: slut-shaming, or hating or harassment. The point is that this man’s reputation was destroyed and that he was reduced to tears by harassment, all because a few journalists didn’t think he was wearing appropriate clothing.

Fortunately, many people agree that bullying a man until he tearfully agrees that you are right is wrong. London mayor Boris Johnson likened the harassment to something out of Stalin’s show trials. TIME condemned the articles, and The Guardian said that they bordered on toxic. The consensus is in, and people (mostly) agree: These kinds of attack pieces are not OK.

Now some of you are wondering what this has to do with GamerGate. Well, let me put it this way: the Verge article I mentioned above? It was written by Chris Plante of Polygon. Back when GamerGate started, he was one of the people who painted all gamers as white male misogynists. He writes these types of hit pieces a lot.

And he’s not alone. The vast majority of the anti-GamerGate news coverage has been made up of hit pieces similar to this one. In fact, I recall one particular person claiming that GamerGate’s mascot, a cartoon girl named Vivian James, was wearing a shirt that was sexist because it was a reference to a rape joke (it’s a green and purple striped sweater …?). To all of you out there who are disgusted with how the online media attacked Matt Taylor: They’ve been doing this to a lot of people for a long time now.

GamerGate is not just about policing games journalists’ conflicts of interest. It’s about telling reporters that they are going to be held accountable for the things they say. It’s about creating an environment where the industry condemns smear campaigns against those who disagree with journalists' world view, and does not consider them the norm.

It’s about creating a journalistic community that serves the truth, not a personal agenda.